Chinaberry Sidewalks (4 page)

His arrogance stirs a foreboding in the pit of my stomach that, once ignored, allows me to voice solidarity with his assessment of the men climbing ladders and crawling around under their houses as a bunch of pussies. “Look at all them ’fraidy-cats,” I sneer not loud enough to be heard beyond our property line, and his “You tell ’em, sweet smell ’em,” chuckled through a cloud of smoke, is all the approval I need.

A similar disdain for preparation will become the hallmark of my adult life, winging it at all costs my Achilles’ heel and “damn the torpedoes” my battle cry. Like my father before me, I’m a spur-of-the-moment snob who looks down my nose at those who plan ahead. Family vans cruising down the highway with all their vacation gear securely fastened on the top bring out the worst in me, my gut reaction being to ram bumper car–style into the driver’s side door and wreck both automobiles. A voice inside my head shouts,
I am my father’s son. I came into this world unprepared, and I expect to die the same way. All you Boy Scout sons of bitches better learn to steer clear of J. W. Crowell’s boy
.

I know my father has doubts about our house’s ability to survive a direct hit from a full-blown hurricane; his contempt for more punctilious homeowners practically announces it over a loudspeaker. Loyalty, however, requires that I set my own misgivings aside and support his head-in-the-sand tactics.

Relief comes in the form of a phone call and an invitation to the Millers’ for a hurricane-watch party, where two or more families huddle together beneath one roof intending to collectively withstand nature’s wrath. In truth, it’s an excuse for the adults to drink hard liquor, smoke cigarettes, and play dominoes. Eventually, with enough alcohol, the lines of propriety become blurred, and sexual innuendo rears its naughty little head. Passes are made, tempers flare, and fistfights nearly break out. When the indoor chaos reaches a peak, gusts up to 140 miles an hour can be counted on to refocus attention on more immediate concerns like survival. Adult participants fall into a pattern of drunken stupidity and intermittent sobriety that lasts as long as it takes a hurricane to “blow on through.” For the kids, it’s open season on making a mess of the house.

My father can hardly contain the joy of having solved his dilemma. I’m tempted to point out that, technically, it was solved
for
him, then decide against it. He thinks abandoning the house in favor of a let’s-all-get-drunk hurricane party is the best idea he’s had in years, and I see no reason to argue. The same can’t be said of my mother. “I’d rather drown in my own backyard than be locked up with that bunch for five minutes,” she tells him. Taking her dissent as the affront to his newfound buoyancy that it’s intended to be, he snaps back: “I tell you what, Cauzette, you go on and get drowned out yonder. Me and the boy’s goin’ over to Floyd and Sally’s.”

Registering complaints doesn’t come naturally to my father; ignoring the obvious is more to his liking. My mother’s apprehension about weathering a Category 4 hurricane in close proximity with the Millers, paired with his need for her unquestioning loyalty, illustrates perfectly the conundrum they will spend their lives trying to unravel. His tendency toward unsubstantiated cockiness and her pinprick precision in delivering the right words at the wrong time make them doubly vulnerable to the bubble-bursting rifts that distinguish their marriage.

Ransacking kitchen drawers for a pack of smokes does little to hide my father’s misgivings about casting the fate of his house to this gale. Translated, “Got-dammit, Cauzette, I know they’s a carton of Pell Mell in here somewhere” means he knows that accepting the Millers’ invitation to an alcohol blackout amounts to nothing more than shirking his responsibilities as a home owner, but that if his wife would just play ball every once in a while, the world would be a better place. A sucker for the pouting Crowell pathos, my mother will turn a deaf ear to her own better judgment and agree to go. If like me she heard him mutter, “If the house is still standin’ when we get home, good. If it ain’t, piss on it,” she’s keeping it to herself.

We’re maybe halfway into the twenty-five-minute drive when the first few sprinkles land softly on the windshield, but something about their arrival hints at Carla’s power. At a stoplight, my father leans forward, elbows flared, chest pressed against the steering wheel, and stares upward through the glass as if at the underbelly of a flying saucer. On the passenger side, my mother does the same. In the backseat, I try to hold my breath until the light turns green. Once the car’s moving again, the rain has begun to fall in earnest. Through a kaleidoscope of reflected streetlight, raindrops burst like liquid fireflies on the back window, and my father asks, “Ya’ll wanna just go back home?”

The Millers’ house is large enough to eat ours for breakfast. A brand-spanking-new chain-link fence surrounds its manicured half acre like a silver necklace. Green latticed shutters flank the front windows, giving added glow to a fresh white paint job. The fifty-foot television antenna standing there in the backyard is known to get the best reception in northeast Houston. For a man who owns a two-truck wrecker service, Floyd Miller has worked wonders in creating an air of affluence around his family. Knowing my father’s need to hide the shame of his own poverty, I’m hardly surprised to see him voluntarily deluded by the façade of a lesser man’s accomplishments. I hate seeing him defer to Mr. Miller but have to admit that their house is better suited to withstand a hurricane than ours.

Besides, Andy and Mike, the Millers’ sons, make the prospect of riding it out at their place far more appealing than staying at home. Three boys roughly the same age triple the opportunity for fun and games. The grown-ups can be grown up, and we can romp until we pass out.

When we arrive, the Millers are sitting in front of their television, watching local newsman Dan Rather’s live report from Galveston. “It’s gonna be a big ’un,” Floyd says as he greets us at the door. “Y’all all better get on in here.”

We settle in, eager to catch up on what had taken place in the half hour since we turned our television off. Andy, Mike, and I nod our heads at the screen an extra beat before slipping off to take advantage of the loosened house rules. To stay abreast of our impending doom, we call frequent time-outs to check what’s happening on television.

High drama surrounds Dan Rather’s inability to divine where Carla will make her landfall. Watching the first-ever live television broadcast of weather radar, I’m put in mind of the monster’s face at the beginning of
Weird
, the weekly sci-fi horror program that comes on Saturday night after the ten o’clock news. Carla appears to be sitting out in the Gulf of Mexico and trying to decide whom to clobber first. It occurs to me she’s playing eeny-meeny-miny-moe to decide where to strike. Thus inspired, I make up a poem and recite it in front of everyone:

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe

Is Port Arthur where I should go?

If I decide on Houston, ya’ll

Everybody’s gonna really bawl

Mrs. Miller and my mother muster a tepid round of applause. Andy hocks up fake loogies and Mike makes armpit farts to show their appreciation.

As the first night passes, I help Andy and Mike build a fort under the dining room table. My father and Mr. Miller get drunk watching the weather reports.

Early the next morning, the boys and I are cracking eggs, burning toast, and plotting a course of adventure in the storm’s gathering intensity. But I have a problem with the coffee-swilling, Bufferin-chewing adults paying so little attention to the requests they’re currently green-lighting. Granting eleven- and twelve-year-olds permission to risk life and limb demands precautionary measures, the very least of which should be “Y’all boys stay in the yard.”

I’m considering speaking my mind when Andy and Mike appear decked out in matching yellow slicker suits. Their fireman-quality rubber boots, galumphing on the hardwood floor, fill me with a shame not unlike my father’s. Bringing a raincoat and galoshes to a hurricane-watch party constitutes the kind of preparation he and I disdain, but I’m beginning to think maybe a little forethought isn’t such a bad thing after all.

Having nothing weather-worthy, I find myself at the mercy of Mrs. Miller, who roots around in her closet for a while and emerges with a see-through plastic raincoat. I have no reason to suspect her motives, but there’s something sadistic in the joy she takes in outfitting me like some old lady and belittling my mother by humiliating me. When she says, “Try this on, sweetie,” and “This oughta work just fine,” it makes me want to puke. But Andy and Mike are so fidgety to get going that I swallow my pride and put the stupid thing on. Once she ties the rain hat under my chin, I look like a refugee from Mrs. Flint’s special-education class.

Complaining to my mother about how retarded I feel is useless; she’s off on some toot about how cute she thinks I am. I want to tell her she can stick that crap up her stupid hillbilly ass, that Andy and Mike are the cute ones because they have
real
raincoats, but I don’t want to give Mrs. Miller the satisfaction. Thank God for my father’s ability to put this fashion fiasco into perspective. “Aw, hell,” he says. “You look like shit, son, but it ain’t gonna matter one bit when that hurricane gets through with you.”

Outdoors, Mr. Miller’s rusty three-pronged frog gig, a sawed-off mop handle, and a flimsy cane fishing pole become customized harpoons destined to bag Moby-Dick. The cane pole accessorizes my makeshift rainwear so naturally that I claim it as the perfect weapon to fit my needs. Looking like an idiot and sporting the least glamorous of harpoons, I’m beginning to share my mother’s reservations about hurricane-watch parties.

An imaginary crow’s nest atop the TV antenna offers a bird’s-eye view of Carla’s cleavage, if some fool seadog dares to make the climb. Desperate to overcome my status as an afterthought, I’m a third of the way up the ladder when whiplash halts my vision quest. The antenna will soon be coming down.

Damn the white whale! Ahab, Queequeg, and Ishmael have bigger fish to fry! Improvising a game of shipwreck on a stack of lumber by the back fence, we hoist our homemade Jolly Roger and it’s promptly plucked from our midst. Horizontal rain pelts our faces like 20-gauge ratshot. Pine trees sway like tent-revival Pentecostals surrendering to their disapproving God. In the woods behind the house, a usually dry fork of Caney Creek floods its banks and sends copperheads in search of higher ground. This alone puts a damper on our adventures.

Quitting the snake-infested woodpile, we hit the streets in rescue mode. But in our search for the perfect emergency, lost kids, little old ladies, and small animals are nowhere to be seen, nor is any sign of life in need of saving. Still, knowing that the will to press on in the face of insurmountable odds is the yardstick by which great rescue teams are measured, we refuse to quit even though throwing caution to a twenty-five-mile-an-hour wind is one thing and braving sudden gusts of up to sixty quite another. Not until a walloping blast rips off my old-lady’s rain hat and wraps it around a street sign do we begin to understand that Carla’s telling us to forget about toddlers and lapdogs; it’s time to save our own behinds. Taking stock, we’re hit with the realization we most likely have strayed too far into the barometric no-man’s-land to make it home alive. To strategize our own evacuation, we have to scream to be heard above what has come to sound like the world’s largest jet engine.

And just when lack of organization and absence of leadership seems on the verge of abandoning us to the wind and rain, someone or something hits the world’s largest Off switch. The tempestuousness of three seconds before is now a mild, late-summer morning. Andy and Mike stop dead in their tracks and cock their heads to one side like twin versions of the Jack Russell terrier on the RCA logo. They appear to be unscrambling some coded meteorological message that I, in my ridiculous outfit, am obviously too far down the chain of command to be privy to. I’m weighing the merits of controlled self-pity over pitching a fit when the voice of my grandmother, dead for six months now, shouts in my ear,
You need to get your hind end on home. This here hurricane’s fixin’ to come unwound
.

And so it does. The boiling charcoal cloudbank that has been idling overhead shoves itself in gear and pops the clutch on the beginning of the end of the world. Panic strikes the heart of our rescue mission, and congratulations on our community service will not be forthcoming.

Three blocks and six lifetimes later, my father meets us at the door. “Hot damn, boys,” he says. “I was startin’ to think I was gonna have to go out in that mess and haul y’all outta some bar ditch.”

The black-and-white Dan Rather trapped inside the Millers’ picture tube isn’t the laid-back news anchor he will become as the century wears on. He’s edgy and aggressive, with a jet-black pompadour greased to near-Elvis perfection. His boxy suit reminds me of the ones that Richard Nixon, the guy who’s been trying to get elected president, always wears. For three straight days he’s been ranting nonstop about the storm-to-end-all-storms, and neither one of them shows any sign of letting up. In fact, with each new phase of Carla’s development, he raises his level of showmanship to match her growing intensity. And now that she’s about to stomp a mud hole in two-thirds of the Gulf Coast, he’s somewhere on the beach in Galveston broadcasting live from her Category 4 mouth.

“I reckon he wants us to know what we’re in for,” says my father, slapping the snap-button pocket of his cowboy shirt for another smoke. “The eyes of Texas are on that ole boy, and he’s sure puttin’ on a show.”

Knowing that sooner or later it was bound to happen, we’re nonetheless dumbstruck when the television screen goes blank and everything else electric in the house shuts off. Blanker yet are the stares we trade in the aftermath of Dan Rather’s dematerialization. This is perfect television, and its drama couldn’t have been scripted any better. My father’s definitively unself-conscious “son of a bitch” raises the question that’s on everybody’s mind: What happened to him, and how do we keep this hellacious house-hammering hurricane from doing the same thing to us?